Splat
Behind Quail, twenty men wrangled the Magic-morphed eagle Urias had used to save her when they returned to Amaris up to the edge of the pit.
It was at least two men tall, with a head of white feathers and a burly black body.
Its blood-crusted talons were as long as Esme’s arms. The monster had two iron shackles on its throat, with five chains attached to each.
The crowd edged away from the beast, terrified but too entranced by the possibility of seeing it tear into a man to run.
“Quail, what are you doing?” Esme yelled, pushing Bal behind her as she inched away from the edge of the pit.
“If you hadn’t come tonight, this would have been easier,” the old man said.
He squatted over them and shrugged his narrow shoulders.
“I’m sorry, old friend. If it makes you feel better, it’s not meant for you.
” He threw a bundle of something to one of the guards and he shoved it in the eagle’s face.
Bal cursed, and Esme realized it was his discarded shirt.
When the creature had its fill of Bal’s scent, the guards dropped their chains and ducked as the beast leapt into the air.
Esme hoped it would just fly away, and then she noticed how it tipped its face up to the air. It was sniffing.
Its eyes flashed when it caught Bal’s sent. And then it barreled for them both.
Esme pushed Bal aside at the last second, and the creature slammed into the pit wall. The impact rocked the ground beneath her and Bal’s feet as they sprinted to the other side of the pit.
The eagle shook off the hit and flew in a tight circle above the pit as it chased them. Its hulking body blotted out the lantern light, and they just barely escaped the wave of black dread it called a shadow.
“What the fuck!” Bal yelled, tugging them both down just in time to miss a snap of that skull-crushing beak.
“Isobel is trying to kill you!” Esme panted, pulling Bal to keep up his lagging pace. She couldn’t turn to look at the bird at the risk of slowing down, but its shadow was nipping at their heels. The monster would be upon them soon.
“Why?”
“She made a deal with Janos. If he wins, he marries her daughter,” Esme spat, skidding to a stop. She backed Bal up against the wall as the eagle coasted over them. Every beat of its massive wings threatened to explode Esme’s ears.
She drew a sword out of night. They couldn’t outrun it, so she’d have to kill it.
“Shit,” Bal cursed. “What’s our plan?”
“You stay on this wall and let me handle it.”
“Fuck that. It’ll kill you.”
The eagle dropped from the sky like a comet and slammed to the ground. A cloud of dust stung Esme’s eyes, but she kept them open. Just one blink and that thing would rip into her.
“Not for long.”
The second she could make out its shape, Esme bolted for the beast. It jutted into the air and disappeared like a ghost. She whirled to find it, and its beak snagged her shirt from behind her.
The eagle flung her into the wall. The brick shattered, and Esme felt every one of her bones do the same.
She didn’t have the time to hurt, so she tore herself from the wall as the eagle went for Bal.
This wouldn’t have been such a hard fight if Bal weren’t in the pit with them, but she had to keep him safe, even from her own attacks.
If she could just get the beast out of the pit, the fight would be finished.
Esme grabbed a brick and hurled it at the creature. It smashed against the eagle’s face in a hail of blood and rock. The animal screeched, spinning around to Esme with one of its eyes a clump of gory feathers.
“I taste better!” she yelled, spitting blood. She could barely keep herself up, but she took a wobbly step forward. “What? Something in your eye?”
Somehow, the eagle understood her. It snapped her up by the arm and shot for the sky. Esme bit down on her agony, its claws cutting down to the bone.
The light of the pit shrunk as she vaulted higher and higher into the Amaris cosmos. At night like this, the city was a twinkling star, blinking as Esme soared closer to real ones. Her eyes were failing, her lungs wheezing shut with them.
She had to end this soon.
Esme grew an axe of shadow and sunk the blade deep into the eagle’s leg. The creature screeched as she wrenched her arm from its limp grasp and tore up its body, then grew a second blade and buried it in the eagle’s shoulder. One of its wings faltered, and then they were slowing.
Oh, shit! She should have aimed for something else.
They rose a single foot higher, and then the terrible, sinking terror of gravity catapulted them back down to earth at triple their original speed. Esme and the eagle spun through the air before she finally balanced its massive body under her knees and brought her axe down into the beast’s chest.
It squawked—a curse if she’d ever heard one—and its eye rolled up and into the back of its head. The beast coughed blood into the open air, blinding Esme just enough for her to lose her balance.
For the next ten seconds, monster and murderer tumbled through the air in a flurry of claws and feathers. Esme was weightless until she wasn’t, and both she and the bird splattered inside the pit. They died the very second they hit the ground.
Death was an unraveling. The knot that tied her tapestry of a life together snapped, and all her threads floated away.
Anger in one direction, love in another, all she was coming apart until only whatever sat at the heart of her heart remained.
She didn’t know what that was, but even it eventually threatened to peel apart.
Then, Omniel Asterou’s goddamn Bond yanked her strings.
All at once, she tangled together again. Her soul was shoved into her body like a foreign invader. Her heart hiccupped into its lazy beat, and her muscles spasmed, her entire body one massive cramp. Her shriveled lungs coughed their first breath.
Esme un-died to a handsome face. A nice face, with dark scruff and long, wet hair. He wasn’t wearing a shirt. Esme didn’t mind. His chest was so big. Esme liked that.
“Esme please, wake up, please!”
If he wasn’t yelling, his voice might be nice.
Hmm, warm. You know who else is warm?
“Where’s Mina?” Esme asked. Her body hurt too much to think of much else.
“Mina? Willimina?” the pretty man worrying over her asked. He reminded Esme of Mina, sort of. A younger, manlier version. They even had the same curly hair. Esme loved Mina’s hair. Esme loved Mina. Where’s Mina?
“My wife,” Esme said. The pretty man sat her up, but Esme’s body was not suited to being upright and it dazed her.
“You’re married?” the man asked. He hauled her up and into his arms and Esme just let him. She’d once carried Mina like this over the threshold of their townhouse.
“Are we married?” Esme asked the man. She blinked heavily, and her brain came back in pieces.
“Are you asking me to marry you now?” Bal chuckled, groaning as he hooked his hand into a loose bit of brick in the pit wall. He heaved them both up, and Esme finally snapped back to life.
“Wait,” she said. She waved a hand and a staircase of shadow materialized under Bal’s feet. He climbed it, not totally confident in it holding his weight. When they stepped up into the street, people flinched away.
Esme locked eyes with the little bird that had got them into this mess, and her memories were finally yanked back. She wriggled out of Bal’s arms to stomp over to Quail and grab him by the collar. His annoying pleading pitched higher when Esme dangled him over the edge of the pit.
“What the fuck, Quail?” she seethed, thinning her glamour just to torture him. “How’d this happen?”
Quail struggled against her, but fear sapped his strength.
“Isobel offered me a title, Esme. I wasn’t going to refuse that!
” he spat. “She delivered the beast. All I had to do was lure your boy to the pit. Idiot wanted easy money. I told him I could make him rich. You weren’t supposed to be here.
It was supposed to look like an accident! ”
“I’m letting you go because up until a few minutes ago, we were friends.
But if I see you sniffing around the castle—if I see you outside of North Amaris at all—I am filling this pit with knives and tossing you in.
” She threw Quail to the ground beside the pit railing, and he almost fell in while scrambling away from her. “You won’t tell Isobel I was here.”
With that, Esme grabbed Bal by the arm and hauled him away. The crowds split for them, which Esme realized was partially because she was still soaked in her own blood. Her shirt was ruined, and her pants too. Undying didn’t wash your clothes.
Bal tripped behind her until they bled back into the usual Hand traffic. Magic’s tide slowed their steps, and she needed to get them both back to the castle before they did something stupid.
“What the fuck?” Bal said. “How are you walking?”
“I’m immortal,” Esme gritted out, letting him go when he finally kept pace.
“That doesn’t explain anything. When you landed, your body wasn’t even a body. And then all the parts just… pulled together,” he said, yet to shake the terror of seeing her die.
Esme shrugged. “Omniel said I couldn’t die,” she said, scratching her head and finding a piece of her skull still loose. “I heal from all my injuries unless I get my heart cut out. Then, I’ll die. But anything less, I’ll unfortunately survive.” She pulled against the blood stiffening her shirt.
Bal stared at her, horrified, until he noticed how she chafed in her blouse. He pulled her sideways, dragging her through the alleys until he found some privacy.
“Here, change into this,” he said, holding out his shirt. He must have snagged it while she’d been threatening Quail.
“I’m fine,” she protested. “We need to get back to the castle.”
“Why rush? It’s just a walk back. I know that shirt can’t be comfortable. Just change,” he pressed, taking a tiny step closer to back her against a wall.
Esme sighed. “It isn’t safe out here,” she said, but she popped open the top button of her shirt anyway. “Too much Magic.”